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Today we’ll see a cool trick about using your pen drive as your password to log into your computer. The beauty of this trick is that you don’t even need to download any additional software to do so. The feature is in-built into your Windows7 operating system. So all you need is a pen drive which will act as your password. So let’s start the program without further delays.

First of all you will need to change the drive letter of your pen drive to A. So type Disk Management in the search box of the Windows and you’ll see Create and format hard disk partitions in search result. Open this link to launch the Disk Management utility. Here you’ll see info about your hard disk partitions and removable disks. So right-click on your pen drive and select Change Drive Letter And Paths.Now change the drive letter of the pen drive and assign A to it. Now it’s done so let’s go ahead.

It’s time to enter syskey in the windows search box to open the syskey program.You’ll see a screen like this-

Enable the encryption which is by default enabled.Now click on Update button and you’ll see the following screen-

Choose to Store Startup Key on Floppy Disk and click OK.Now a startup key will be stored in your pen drive. If you have noticed that this program stores the startup key on floppy disk and that’s the reason why we have to change the drive letter of our pen drive to A because A and B represents floppy drives.

At this stage the process is completed and the next time you boot into your machine you’ll require that pen drive to login.Happy free password booting.

Welcome back to the troubleshooting tutorials series we are sharing through this blog. For the past 4 days I am dealing with troubleshooting of different configuration files under /etc and /boot and whatever I learn from that experience is presented here so that more and more people can acquire the basic troubleshooting skills in Linux. Today we’ll see what to do in case your inittab file is deleted.

First of all let’s understand what is the importance of inittab file. You may know that init is the first process running under Linux and this file is used to start init process. This file also start the runlevels and if this file is deleted you won’t be able to boot. You can’t use even single user mode to fix the problem.

The situation may seem complex to you but the solution is quite easy for that kind of problem. Here we’ll have to enter into rescue mode and if you are following this tutorial series then you must recall that I have told you how to enter into rescue mode. If you have missed the show then that’s not a problem as you can get it from this link.

Now when you’ve entered into rescue mode then it’s time to enter into root environment using chroot /mnt/sysimage command.Now you’ll have to mount he CD or iso file in case you are using RHEL under VMWare. To mount it issue mount /dev/hdc /mnt command. Do remember that on your system the path to CD or iso may be different from mine. So you must know the right path and for this you can use df -h command.

Once you have mounted the CD or iso all you need to do is to install initscripts rpm file stored under Server folder of the CD or iso. So issue rpm -Uvh –force /mnt/Server/init and hit tab to auto-complete the full name of the initscripts rpm file.Once the installation is complete you’ll get your inittab file back.

But there is a small glitch.When you’ll reboot your machine then it will boot into runlevel 3. You can change the default runlevel to 5 and next time it will boot in graphical mode.

Back again with another troubleshooting tutorial. This time we’ll deal with the initrd image file. This is the file needed during the booting to initialize the kernel. As I told you earlier that I am using scripts contained in Trouble-Maker tool. Last time it blow my network off and this time it’s playing with my initrd image. After running that script I got following screen-

As you can see that it’s showing file not found error. I even tried to boot into single user mode but that didn’t work because the same message appeared there too. Now the last option is to boot into rescue mode and try to recover from the shit.

I am using RHEL on Vmware and I select the booting device to CD to enter into rescue mode..You can also boot from RHEL CD if you are using RHEL as a stand-alone installation. At the start of booting you’ll be prompt with the following screen. Type linux rescue to enter into rescue mode.

Once you boot into rescue mode you’re system will be mounted on /mnt/sysimage. To enter into root environment you’ll have to issue chroot /mnt/sysimage command. So type this command.

We know that initrd file is defined at /boot/grub/grub.conf file. So I opened this file using vi /boot/grub/grub.conf command.You can’t use vim here. But here everything was ok.

Now I got stuck at this point because grub.conf file was correct. Then I listed /boot to see the contents of the directory and-voila! The problem was here. The script I executed didn’t alter my grub file but it changed the name of the initrd file.

It appended .missing to the name of initrd file and thus making it inaccessible for grub. To recover from that problem I just renamed it to its original name using mv /boot/initrd-2.6.18-128.el5.img.missing /boot/initrd-2.6.18-128.el5.img command.Now just save it quit the rescue mode using ctrl+d.Now the system started normally. So another problem is solved successfully.Let’s see next is what.